It’s Ken Whyte who taught me that journalistic fame is the most fleeting of all — fishwrap by sundown and all that — so I probably need to tell most of you who Robert Fulford even was. He was perhaps the great Canadian journalist of the last 70 years, if we think of journalism as the art of telling stories and helping other journalists tell theirs. He held a magazine called Saturday Night above water for decades after the forces of gravity and finance should have done for it, and his enthusiasms — for a story, a publication, a colleague — elevated their objects’ place in the culture a thousand times.

Fulford died on Tuesday at 92. It’s impossible to imagine him living a much shorter life. He had so much to do. Here are the obits in the Globe, the National Post and the Star. He worked at all three papers. The first two assigned the obit to their best writers well ahead of the dreadful day. The third carried CP. Fulford would have noticed.

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Everyone’s quoting a piece Ken Whyte wrote when Fulford retired in 2020, shortly before he moved into a Toronto long-term care home. It’s here, paywalled. The thing I can barely convey to you today, and that weighed heavily on me when we were colleagues at the Post, was how vast Fulford’s talent was. You couldn’t read him without thinking, “Man, if this is the standard, I’m really going to have to start picking my game up.” Here’s Ken, on the beginning of Fulford’s career:

A native Torontonian, born in the Beach in 1932, he’d started in journalism while still in high school, reporting on amateur sports for CHUM radio. He dropped out in 1950 to join the Globe & Mail as a sports reporter, and by 1959 was a columnist for the Toronto Star. He produced a daily column about books and the arts for the Star, a crazy feat of productivity, especially given his high journalistic standards, his prodigious research (he read all the books, watched all the shows, attended all the galleries), and the fact that he was also hosting the weekly arts show This Is Robert Fulford on the CBC and freelancing for Down Beat and Saturday Night.

In case you missed it: he was a high-school dropout.

A lifetime later, Fulford astounded all of us by leaving the Globe to join the National Post when it was all of a year old. If anything, that particular choice — to stay away for the launch, but then to jump ship once he’d seen what we were up to — was validation beyond our hopes. Ken again:

I was going to attempt here a list of Bob’s greatest hits from the National Post but there are too many to choose from. By rough count, two thousand columns. Instead, I’ll give you a few samples from 2001, which is when I thought he got comfortable and demonstrated the full range of things he could profitably tackle for the paper. There was George W. Bush as a Shakespearean character. This piece on mendacious libel litigation. This one on dinosaur discoveries. This about draft dodgers in Canada. And this on lying. Here’s the first of a three-parter on the historian Niall Ferguson.

I first became aware of him in 1987, when I was an undergrad at the UWO Gazette. Saturday Night published a 100th-anniversary issue, glossy enough to persuade me to pick the thing off the newsstand and pay cash money for a copy. Mordecai Richler was in it, an excerpt from his upcoming novel, Solomon Gursky Was Here. The throwaway vignette about the tavern in the Eastern Townships. I was hooked.

Saturday Night is probably something I also need to define: a monthly magazine on Canadian topics, cheeky, underfinanced, entirely unashamed for more than a century to be in the business of telling Canadian stories as though they deserved to be told. A hobby for rich patrons, Norman Webster in the 1970s and 80s, Conrad Black afterward. Then it died. The glossy 100th-anniversary issue made me a regular reader. Fulford quit, nervously, when Black bought the magazine, but remained on cordial terms with his successors, John Fraser and Ken Whyte, and by 1999 he decided he didn’t even mind working for Black any more.

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We had lunch twice. One was a get-to-know-you session after he joined the Post. He’d just written a column in which he declared that some young cultural figure was full of shit. All day today I couldn’t remember who it was, and now I remember but I’ll pretend I don’t. Fulford’s dismissive column drew an avalanche of praise from people who didn’t realize they couldn’t stand this person until Fulford told them it was all right. At lunch he roared with laughter. “People who don’t agree on anything agreed that this guy was a jerk,” he said. “I think I united the country, Paul!”

A couple of years later, the publisher of the Montreal Gazette thought I might make a good editor for the newspaper. He suggested a plan: I would quit my job as a smart-aleck Post columnist and try running something modest, like The Gazette’s editorial pages. If I didn’t wreck everything I would be promoted to editor-in-chief. It was tempting, but I was nervous. I was starting to think I might be a bit of a loner.

I jumped on a train from Ottawa and had lunch with Fulford in Toronto. He had been a great editor. Should I give it a try? He paused to consider it. “When I quit Saturday Night, I was despondent,” he said at last. “For months. And then one day I woke up and I thought, ‘Somewhere in Canada today, a writer is going to sleep through a deadline and a Saturday Night cover story is going to fall through. Or an advertiser is going to pull a major ad buy because they didn’t like somebody’s choice of a photo. Or some other catastrophe is going to threaten to wreck everything the people at Saturday Night have been working to accomplish.”

Pause for effect. “And it won’t be my problem.”

After that epiphany, he said, he slept like a baby, and while he still had another few million words to write, he never took another management job. “You’re a writer, Paul,” he said. “You don’t want to fire people.”

I headed back to Union Station, ready for my train home. At the newsstand on the way, I picked up a copy of The Gazette and saw that the owners had fired the publisher who’d offered me the job. The path Fulford had warned me against was foreclosed. But it was a great lunch.

Over the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which supporters of the Democratic Party used to think was great, the Washington Post editorial board has once again been calling for less darkness. Unfortunately for its readers, the Post’s particular concern is about the Democratic presidential candidate and her reluctance to face journalistic scrutiny. Write the editors:

Since replacing President Joe Biden at the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has neither given a sit-down interview nor held a news conference. Her campaign’s website lacks an “Issues” page (there’s only a biography)….

If she hopes to prevail, Ms. Harris needs to present her ideas. The media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them.

To which the members of the public who subscribe to the Post have replied, in the editorial’s own comment section: Get stuffed, Washington Post editorial board!

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I see the Macdonald-Laurier Institute has generated almost no perceptible controversy by publishing The Ottawa Declaration on Canadian Journalism, whose signatories declare they “will not accept the per employee subsidies currently on offer from government and industry.”

I’m one of the signatories.

I’m not usually a signer of things besides my own journalism. But the so-called Ottawa Declaration says several things that strike me as true, obvious and worth saying. Again, you can read it for yourself here. But to me the main points are: (1) that the fact of government subsidies to news organizations will lead reasonable people to suspect it puts those organizations in a conflict of interest in their coverage of politics; (2) that the design of the subsidies amounts to a life raft for organizations that continue to organize themselves along old models that no longer work, stifling initiative and innovation.

This is pretty much what I wrote, during a brief stint at the Toronto Star, in two columns more than seven years ago, as soon as I realized the Trudeau government was getting ready to prop up newsgathering. (I should point out that The Star was then in the early stages of lobbying for what became the current subsidy regime, but they ran my columns without question or hesitation and the paper’s management didn’t so much as grumble to me.) Since I believed this stuff from the outset, I might as well put my name to it now.

The Ottawa Declaration, whose grandiose title makes me want to make air-quotes every time I write it, follows a one-day conference of independent news organizations three weeks ago. Some of the organizations that attended didn’t sign the resulting declaration. The declaration contains language about media outlets that serve minority communities that, I think, was designed to address some of those shops’ concerns. I’m surprised, in a couple of cases, by whose names I don’t see on this declaration, but I’m not in a mood to call anyone out. Some people just aren’t joiners. I dithered before signing myself.

By now subscribers to this newsletter have had plenty of time to figure out where I fit in the media landscape. I don’t make a show of slagging Teh MaiNStreAM MedIAZ as though having a different business model — quite frankly, after having been forced into a different business model by the collapse of an industry around me — made me morally superior. I still accept payment for my appearances on the CBC and Radio-Canada, as I do for my occasional appearances on CTV. And I’m well aware that government programs to prop up magazine publishing had the effect of subsidizing the journalism we did at Maclean’s, right through the 19 years I was there — through the governments of Paul Martin, Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau.

But I’ve had profound misgivings about extending government subsidies to private news organizations for as long as some colleagues have been working hard to expand those subsidies. I have no problem saying so, again. The Trudeau government has been utterly disdainful of the concerns raised here and elsewhere. They’re content to prop up Potemkin newspapers that can’t afford to do proper reporting, have collapsing audiences even when they give their material away, and face bland-faced stonewalling and a Kafkaesque access-to-information regime from the government that claims to be their friend.

The list of signatories to this declaration is, to some extent, a list of strange bedfellows. There are some people on it with whom I agree on very little. I won’t lose sleep over it. We agree on this. That’s all we claim today and all I need.

I recognize that for many of my subscribers, the fact that I’m less dependent on Ottawa for my work is an important reason to support me. I’ve never marketed myself as a lone defender of truth against the encroaching state, and I don’t plan to start. But do I appreciate your support? Absolutely. Whatever it is I’m doing here, I could never have done it without you.

I’ve been in Edmonton this week working on an ambitious story about the opioid crisis. You’ll have noticed that it’s kept me from writing much this week. I’ll land something soon that will, I hope, have been worth the wait. Thanks, as always, for your patience and support.

Readers should note that today’s post contains more salty language than usual.

In 1966 a student at the United States Military Academy at West Point named Lucian K. Truscott IV went through his mail and opened the latest edition of the Village Voice. Truscott was 19, strong and tall, crewcut and ramrod-straight, heir to one of America’s great military families. The Voice was a weekly tabloid newspaper, weird by Truscott’s lights, but he was a subscriber because its encyclopedic arts and culture listings made it an invaluable guide for the weekends when he could get to Manhattan on leave.

This week’s edition had a story about Abbie Hoffman, who was against the war in Vietnam and liked to say outrageous things. Truscott wasn’t really equipped to process what he was reading. So he wrote a letter to the editor of the Village Voice: “Abbie Hoffman is an asshole.” Signed, Lucian K. Truscott IV, West Point, New York.

Truscott’s letter ran at the top of the next week’s letters section, which was one of the paper’s most-read features. It drew rebuttals from about half the smartasses in New York. He wrote back to set them straight. Soon the correspondence between Truscott and his tormentors was a staple of each week’s letters section.

Well, one thing leads to another, Truscott winds up at the Electric Circus club listening to Wavy Gravy, and again he can’t believe this madness, so he writes the longest letter he’s written yet. Thousands of words. Since he was still in New York, he walked over to the Voice and slid his tract under the door. The following Wednesday the whole screed ran, starting on Page 1.

Pretty soon Truscott was at the Voice Christmas party in his dress uniform and sneakers. “I opened the door and I hit Mayor Lindsay on the elbow, and he spilled his drink on Bob Dylan,” Truscott told Tricia Romano. I am getting all of this from Romano’s glorious new oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture.

Eventually Truscott became a staff writer at the Voice. Over time he became what he beheld, and as such he also became a subject of the paper’s marketing efforts:

The Voice went on to become one of the world’s most important newspapers, a leading source of street-level news, cultural criticism, hilarity and mourning. It closed in 2018 and has lately kind-of half-reopened, a zombie casualty of the internet like so many others. Romano’s book reminds the paper’s admirers why it mattered, and is therefore a guide to mattering in general. It’s a ferociously entertaining read, admirably complete.

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The Voice was founded in 1955 by three WWII military veterans, Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer. Mailer was a blowhard (“I have only one prayer,” his first column read, “that I weary of you before you tire of me”) but he knew how to draw a crowd. Wolf and Fancher actually wanted to run a newspaper. The war had shaped them, made them pacifist and suspicious of conformity, which set them up well for American culture’s next few dozen acid baths. Vietnam. The Stonewall riot (the gay bar was four doors down from the Voice’s office; when Truscott’s early coverage of a brutal police raid and the clients’ resistance was dismissive, the fledgling gay-rights movement devoted some of its early energy to picketing the Voice). Women’s liberation. The fight to break Robert Moses’ control over the city’s urban development. Slum lords and the judges who always ruled in their favour against their tenants. And on and on, for half a century. The Voice won three Pulitzer prizes. It built Ed Koch up — he was the paper’s lawyer in the early days — and tore him down, debating along the way whether it should out him. It provided some of the earliest and most combative coverage of Donald Trump, Spike Lee, hip-hop, Off-Broadway, AIDS, ACT UP and Talking Heads.

Talking Heads frontman David Byrne “sings in a high somber voice,” Richard Goldstein wrote in 1976, “somewhat like a seagull talking to its shrink.” If Jonathan Richman, another singer of the era, “plays the kid who ate his snot, David plays the kid who held his farts in.” (“In a good way,” Robert Christgau, Goldstein’s editor, says of his writer’s portrayal of Byrne.)

Greenwich Village was a magnet for people who cared about these things, or were buffeted by them, because it was cheap, residential, at once eccentric and neighbourly. “The original bohemians,” Calvin Trillin wrote in 1982, “were mainly people who came from small, peaceful towns, and they settled in the Village partly because compared to the rest of Manhattan it had the sort of informality and neighbourliness they were used to at home. In other words, it reminded them of the Midwest.”

Romano, who wrote for the Voice for eight years near the end of its (first?) run, interviewed hundreds of people for this book. She interweaves all of those interviews, plus other archival material and short excerpts from the relevant articles, with a masterfully light touch. Paragraphs and chapters are short.

Romano touches on every element of the Voice’s coverage, from its lucrative classified ads — both Blondie and Bruce Springsteen hired drummers using Voice personals in 1975 — to Christgau’s “Consumer Guide” record-review column, to film critic Andrew Sarris’s feud with The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, to the time Stanley Crouch had to be fired in 1988 because he finally slugged a colleague in the newsroom instead of merely threatening to.

Fairly frequently I could hardly believe what I was reading. “She used to do a piece called Yams up My Grannie’s Ass,” arts writer C. Carr says of performance artist Karen Finley. “To tell you the truth I can’t even remember how the yams tied into that.”

In fact the precise disposition of the yams became a subject of debate for much of 1986 in the Voice’s news and letters columns. A lot of the front-of-the-book politics writers, typically older and whiter than the culture writers, were apoplectic that the Karen Finley profile landed on Page 1. They thought it lowered the tone of the place. I’m surprised anyone could be surprised to see anything at all on the cover of the Village Voice as late as 1986, let alone its own writers. “I thought about writing a letter to the Voice,” Finley tells Romano, “but every time I sat down to write, ‘I never put a yam in my butt,’ I’d think, ‘But what if I had? SO WHAT?’”

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I don’t recall how I learned that Romano was writing an oral history of the Village Voice and was crowdfunding to meet her expenses. I had never heard of her. It was late 2021, full COVID lockdown days, and I was sending more of my money than usual directly to musicians and other creators to tide them over. When I learned that this person was trying to write a definitive history of the Voice, I thought for a few hours, then sent her a few hundred dollars, enough so she’d notice it had arrived.

She sent a thank-you note. I sent this in return.

“I never went to journalism school. I started reading the Voice in high school because it had the best New York music listings and part of me wanted to be a jazz trumpeter. When I got to university I discovered a complete back collection of the Village Voice at the main campus library. I spent hundreds of hours reading those old copies. This probably contributed to my flunking out of pre-med, but what the heck. Later I became a journalist and I've done pretty well at it. I found out about your project only yesterday and I thought about how much I learned by reading Gary Giddins, Greg Tate, Stanley Crouch, Kyle Gann, Nat Hentoff, Wayne Barrett, Michael Tomasky, Enrique Fernandez, Michael Feingold... I figure I owe them all, so I sent a small portion of what I owe them to you. I've written books, and I know how lonely it can be right through the home stretch. I hope you know it'll all have been worth it. I'm very much looking forward to what you come up with. Best wishes, pw”

This thing I do — the jittery prose style, the readiness to get up and fight now and then, the wide range of topics, so much of my style, whatever it is — it comes as much from reading the Voice as from anyplace else. I started at the back, with the listings and with Giddins’ deeply informed jazz writing, but once you’ve bought the thing and there’s no internet, you might as well keep reading. So like Lucian Truscott I was eventually inspired, instructed, corrupted by the Voice. I viewed my donation to Romano as belated payment in lieu of journalism-school tuition.

Part of the value of Romano’s book is that it’s a reminder of the extended moment — roughly the period between Johannes Gutenberg and Steve Jobs — when printing equipment and technology was just hard enough to procure and use that most people didn’t have it, but it didn’t take unimaginable wealth to leap that barrier either. A few weirdos with a rich cousin or a modest classified-ads business could do it. In postwar America, with so many of the country’s cultural assumptions up for grabs, making the effort became more urgent and rewarding than it had been in decades. (Louis Menand’s sprawling 2021 book The Free World tries to tell the story of that postwar ferment.) It’s no surprise that the Village Voice was founded within a few years of the printing operation at San Francisco’s City Lights bookshop, where Lawrence Ferlinghetti brought the Beat movement to the world by cranking out cheap and cheerful editions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and others. Operations on both coasts were examples of low-barrier publishing by determined romantics.

By the 90s, the Voice had thousands of imitators in cities around the world, including four alternative weekly newspapers in Montreal alone. A characteristic of all such operations was that they were staffed by people who could hardly believe their good luck. Almost all of those papers are gone now. The technological and financial barriers that made them both possible and valuable have collapsed altogether. Now anyone can publish anything by shunting a few electrons back and forth, and on most days, that’s how it reads.

It’s remarkable how often the people in Romano’s book would learn they had written for the Voice after it had already happened. Plainly nobody here was running a tight ship. In 1965 a longshoreman named Joe Flaherty didn’t like a street protest against Mayor John Lindsay, so he wrote a piece called “Why the Fun Has Left Fun City” for the Bay Ridge Home Reporter. Jack Deacy was at the Home Reporter, and Flaherty’s piece didn’t really suit it, so Deacy dropped it through the mail slot at the Voice. The next Thursday Flaherty’s article was on the front page of the Voice. He still hadn’t been told.

Others knew precisely what they were doing. Mary Perot Nichols was at the Voice when Robert Moses, the legendary New York city planner, was trying to ransack the Village the way he had run roughshod over too many other modest residential neighbourhoods. She also built a coalition of interests to stand up to Moses. With Jane Jacobs, Nichols had a meeting with the local representative of the Gambino crime family.

“He said something like, ‘Why should I care?’” Nichols’ daughter Eliza Nichols recalls. “And my mother said, ‘If that freeway is built, your entire neighborhood’s going to be destroyed. And all those small businessmen who pay tribute to you and who you control are no longer going to exist.’”

Thus do writers learn about power. Usually their words were all the power they needed. In 1969 Jack Newfield heard about how cheap lead paint was killing tenants. In the South Bronx he met Brenda Scurry, whose 23-month-old daughter, Janet, had died of lead poisoning that April. “My day with Brenda Scurry became the launching pad for five lead-poisoning articles I would write over the next four months. I took the subway back to the Voice office and that afternoon and evening wrote five thousand words in the white heat of fresh emotion.” John Lindsay’s became the first city government in America to restrict the use of lead paint.

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Many of the stories Romano recounts were familiar to me — the Stanley Crouch fisticuffs, the way Greg Tate goaded the paper to cover hip-hop properly and expanded its readers’ vocabularies with his dense, thorny prose. (From 1985’s “Yo, Hermaneutics:” “Word, word. Word up: Thelonious X. Thrashfunk sez, yo Greg, black people need our own Roland Barthes, man.”)

One of the stories I didn’t know is the tale of David Schneiderman, brought in as the paper’s editor-in-chief by a later generation of owners in 1978, who ended up staying in one management capacity or other for nearly 30 years. Schneiderman was a New York Times man before he came to the Voice. He dressed like it, and the Voice staff were pretty sure at the outset that they didn’t trust him. But he hired and promoted much of the paper’s most talented women, Black and gay writers, partly precisely because the male old guard was too busy giving him side-eye. He ended up defining the paper’s tone and personality for longer than anyone else.

“It didn’t matter where you were when you got there,” Richard Goldstein tells Romano in an attempt to explain the way a button-down Times man came to define the Voice. “Eventually the paper would take you over and change you. This happened to David. The paper altered him, in a good way.” And not only Schneiderman.

The Writers’ Festival is in town

I’m delighted to be at the Ottawa International Writers’ Festival on Thursday for a panel discussing the Freedom Convoy. Ottawa readers: tickets are still available. Obviously part of the point of the event, and of writers’ festivals everywhere, is to drum up interest for books. Here’s mine. You can buy direct from the publisher, Sutherland House, at that link, or from one of Canada’s great independent booksellers or this big chain or that.

An Emergency In Ottawa has been on sale for three weeks. Sales have been strong, online customer reviews generous. Non-fiction writers wish all the time that there were more broad public conversation about their books. I feel it too, although I didn’t expect more. Almost no publications discuss books any more. (The books keep getting published, and read, just not debated.) And mine’s odd. And slim. And the national consensus for turning the page that followed the February publication of Paul Rouleau’s Public Order Emergency Commission report was so resounding you could hear the thud. I sure did.

But hundreds of you have already read An Emergency In Ottawa. More soon will. I wanted to share some thoughts about what I was trying to do with this book.

• Partly this is because I have colleagues who think about writing books, and I always want to encourage that urge. Perhaps demystifying the process will help. (This post is filed under the “To the Trade” rubric of this newsletter, reserved for journalism shop talk, for a reason.)

• Partly it’s because this 100-page essay is an odd duck I’ve grown fond of. I want to make a case for it.

• Partly it’s because one reader with sterling credentials didn’t like it much. I think he deserves a response.

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Prof. Wark dissents

The reader is Wesley Wark, a veteran academic historian who’s advised prime ministers on national security. His Substack newsletter has been in my Recommendations list for months, and vice versa. His take on my book appeared the day after publication in April:

As profs have been saying since they were marking my undergrad papers, Wark finds my book an entertaining read that doesn’t say much. (I think profs have always meant the “fun read” bit as a pejorative. I have long declined to make the desired adjustments.)

Writes Wark:

But once past the fun, which is mostly provided in pen portraits of some of the key participants in the Commission hearings and some right-on witticisms, there is a puzzle, at least for me.

The puzzle is, what did Wells actually make of it all?

He goes on to complain that I don’t assess whether Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act was justified and, in fact, I don’t say what I thought of the convoy in general. He clearly thought the people in the convoy were terrible and wishes I were more solidly on his side.

I made a point of not replying to Wark immediately because his post is obviously fair comment. I expected somebody would say what he says. I expect to hear variations on his themes at Thursday’s book event.

I’m so tired of people who respond to criticism by dropping a house on their critics. I won’t do that here. I just want to point out that, while I wrote half the book very quickly (as my publisher Ken Whyte entertainingly relates), I thought about the damned thing for close to six months. Often while watching testimony at the Rouleau commission. Often during walks at night. (Chapter 4, the chapter on policing, got a complete rewrite, one of the most thorough self-edits I’ve done for any project. One day I might show you the original and revised chapters so you can compare.) Everything in it is the result of a choice, often driven by the constraints of the short-book form, always with the goal of saying fresh and useful things. Here’s how that went.

The problem of abundance

The first thing you notice at a public inquiry is that people talk a lot. Commissioner Rouleau heard more than 70 witnesses over six weeks. Transcripts of each day’s hearings often ran past 300 pages per day. So that’s 10,000 pages of transcripts. There were also thousands of documents, including memos and emails exchanged during the crisis at every level of government; contemporaneous minutes of meetings; exchanges of collegiate humour via text message between cabinet ministers; Zoom chats; and more. Academics wrote background papers. Commission staff produced detailed chronologies of events before the Convoy, while it was happening, and around the world.

It was fantastic. My first reaction was that much of it, especially at the federal-government level where I work, was a glorious chance to see how decisions are actually made that contrasted starkly with the happy-crappy “communications product” the Trudeau government seems to think people believe. Decision-makers stood exposed as imprecise, scared, angry, funny, forgetful, sometimes heroic figures who got handed a hard job when they were already tired of being tired.

It was a ten-ring circus, with similar tableaux playing out in the federal government, in provincial governments in Ontario and Alberta, at Ottawa City Hall, in multiple police forces, and among the protesters. And it was more than words. If there was any point in showing up at the hearings (as I did often but not every day), it was to convey the feeling in the rooms, the mood, the tones, gestures and reactions. Within days I recalled, and quoted here, Don DeLillo’s line about the Warren Commission archive as “the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.”

But I wouldn’t get to write a megaton novel. I had 100 pages. One-third of a single day’s testimony transcript, or one-twentieth of Rouleau’s final report. I liked the challenge! But it was a challenge.

It forced choices. Even the daily news reporters had to ignore almost everything that happened each day, in favour of picking a single news hook per day, one moment of confrontation or revelation that seemed to matter. At first my plan was to do the same. The fabulous smorgasbord of crisis sociology would have to go. I’d treat the entire commission as a Justin Trudeau witch-dunking. Was he legally justified in using the Emergencies Act? Yes or No? Show your work.

Then I started to second-guess myself. What would I be throwing out? Was there value in what I planned to keep?

Skipping the CSIS Act test

The second question became easy to answer. In one of my regular posts from Rouleau testimony, I wrote: “Ask yourself whether you think Trudeau was right to use the Emergencies Act, and then ask whether you’ll change your mind if Paul Rouleau disagrees with you. See? Everyone else is like you. Stubborn.”

Debates are so polarized these days. The people who are most eager to “debate” are least likely to even hear contradictory evidence. When I asked whether Rouleau’s answer would change anyone’s mind, it wasn’t a throwaway line. I started to brood on it.

When Rouleau’s report came out, even he didn’t really seem interested in the question of the Act’s appropriate use. Sure, he builds a multi-part test, spends a few pages applying it to federal actions. But it feels listless. On the day he published his conclusion — the feds passed every part of the test with flying colours! — he admitted, almost in the same sentence, that “reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion.”

And then nobody in Canada proceeded to argue over any of it. I count myself as one of the reasonable people who reached a different conclusion, but Rouleau took the fight right out of me. As he points out, none of the charges laid at the end of the Convoy was laid under the emergency regulations. Frozen accounts were soon unfrozen. Charter rights protect the arrested, who are having their day in court. Rouleau’s opinion is not dispositive in law; trial judges will feel free to reach different conclusions.

I decide early that this debate wouldn’t be all of my book. By the end it had vanished entirely.

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Life’s rich pageant

I was left with DeLillo’s megaton James Joyce novel. An unprecedented moment in the country’s life. Tired politicians, tired cops, frightened city, mechanized rolling mob. None of them hearing any of the others. Hundreds of people ignoring or denying or disbelieving obvious things. A century of social unrest in reaction to vaccines. A planet of civil unrest in reaction to COVID restrictions. Hundreds of governments around the world coping with this terrible thing that had wrecked their beautiful plans. Praying they were getting it right. Maybe the tiniest bit defensive.

I thought: Maybe some of this is interesting.

I keep models in mind when I’m working on a big project. I always pick better writers, musicians, even athletes. I’ll fall short but I’ll stretch on the way. How do the best in their fields juggle themes? How do they use rhythm, structure, mood?

Slowly, in bits, I’ve been reading the script of Tony Kushner’s two-part play Angels In America, watching the HBO TV adaptation. I always thought it was a play about AIDS in the Reagan years. Turns out it’s about everything. Politics, mentorship, fear wrecking love, the immigrant experience, murderous hate, family lineage, middle America vs. the coastal metropolis. Kushner’s subtitle is A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. His parents were musicians. He knows a fantasia is a composition that doesn’t follow a strict structural model. I told Ken Whyte I wanted to write a not-particularly-gay fantasia on national themes. He stopped asking me for updates.

I still had only 100 pages, but if I could nod at a bunch of the themes that got raised in the commission room, I could give a sense of the breadth of both the commission and the historic moment it studied. The text of the Act requires the public inquiry to study “the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued.” Very well, then. A book about circumstances.

Specific themes

But neither is the whole book just faffy atmospherics, I hope. It engages large areas of policy debate that will certainly arise many times before the Emergencies Act gets used again, if it ever does.

Chapter Two seems at first to be just a whirlwind recap of the whole pandemic, but if if were only that I’d have wasted 10 pages. The first point it makes is that governments’ response to the pandemic was chaotic, changed far too often, and scapegoated public-health officials for politicians’ decisions. Rouleau’s commission staff notes that the Ontario government issued 200 orders-in-council in respect of the pandemic in 2020 alone. I call that “a perfectly asinine level of information to dump on any citizenry.” The second point it makes is that by the end, specific measures tightening restrictions led directly, twice within a day, to specific acts of backlash by segments of the population.

Chapter Four on policing is, I think, more important than anything I could have said about the threshold test for invoking the Emergencies Act. This is the stuff about “police liaison teams” that meet protesters before the protest event, stay in touch while it’s happening, and compare notes after it’s over, always with a goal of “de-escalating” by “giving everyone a win.” That was the material we gave to the Globe as an excerpt before publication. It informed my interview, the most detailed I’ve seen anywhere, with Ottawa’s new police chief.

I have so far failed to generate any public discussion over police methods. My consolation is that a nearly identical debate over police tactics in Europe was front-page news in Le Monde two weeks ago, and that Le Monde saw fit to translate its article into English for broader discussion. Oh, those journalists. Always suckers for fun reads.

In his critique, Wark is amused by my often-expressed wish that “the federal government” should “talk with the protesters.” “Talk about what, and talk with whom is never quite clear,” he writes. He adds: “Wells surely needed to do battle with the Prime Minister’s own reflection on the question of talking to the protesters—that they didn’t come to Ottawa to be heard, but to be obeyed.”

Well, if you insist. I’m careful to offer no sweeping criticism of the federal government in the book. They had a hard job. But on Wark’s narrower question, the Prime Minister’s “reflection” is bullshit on stilts. It fails at the first pronoun — “they.”

The policing doctrine that animated the OPP and that Le Monde faults the French police for ignoring was developed in parallel, while the OPP was coming up with the PLT model in the 2010s, in 12 European Union countries. As Le Monde notes again, in another article it translated into English again, the model was developed during a three-year field study called GODIAC, for "Good Practice for Dialogue and Communication as Strategic Principles for Policing Political Manifestations in Europe.”

A GODIAC handbook identifies four principles of good public-order policing: “education, facilitation, communication and differentiation.” Educate the police about who they’re policing. Facilitate peaceful protest. Communicate with all stakeholders, absolutely including protesters. (Just by the way, when somebody who’s spent his life in universities asks “talk about what” and “talk with whom,” I’m really not sure I’m the glib one.)

The fourth principle is “differentiate.” In other words, do not ever treat a crowd of protesters as an undifferentiated “they.” In Chapter 5 of my fun book, we learn that the Convoy’s ringleaders had, in many cases, never met before they got to Ottawa; that they disagreed about fundamental points of their argument and their plans; and that they reacted in starkly different ways to the same events. Police are learning through trial and study that such cleavages come in handy. GODIAC’s handbook: “Undifferentiated police intervention can instigate unification of crowd members against them, involving those with no prior confrontational intentions.”

The OPP was spurred to rethink its methods after Dudley George got shot at Ipperwash. In Europe, it was the anti-globalization donnybrooks at a series of summits in the early 2000s. I was at the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in 2001, a three-day sinfonia concertante for teargas canisters and riot shields. There was definitely a satisfying amount of “they” going on there.

I suspect I have had limited success making readers think about this because in Canada, educated people think cops are morons or worse. The funny thing is, when you stop patting yourself on the back for half a minute, you find many large piles of social-science research, produced by cops or at their behest in dozens of jurisdictions. The cop in downtown Ottawa who’d read more of it than anyone had a specific list of people to talk to and a specific list of topics to discuss, based on a decade and a half of study and experience. Sorry that wasn’t clearer in my fun book.

There’s more. Chapter 5 cites the work of Berkeley health-care historian Elena Conis, whose 2015 book Vaccine Nation tracks 150 years of resistance to public-health vaccination drives. Conis gets vaccines, believes they work, mourns disease and death among people who could have been protected. But she notes that different groups have found different reasons for refusing vaccines at different times, and that their reasons are often socially constructed. This suggests that every time somebody in a position of authority says, “By God, we’re all getting vaccinated now,” a bunch of other people will say no. Damnedest thing. Terribly annoying. But I’m given to understand that the field of human endeavour devoted to noticing that kind of thing is called social science.

By now I’ve written nearly an extra chapter about the book in its defence. Time to wrap up. A final note about tone. Some readers worry that I’m insufficiently censorious in the book about the Convoy protesters. Your mileage may vary: I do point out that the noise and exhaust fumes they kicked up easily meets my definition of violence against my Centretown neighbours, who had done nothing to deserve it. I have no problem with the arrests and the charges. The courts will sort it out, approximately as always.

But we are living in a stupid time, and to me one of the purest manifestations of the current stupidity is the number of people who seem to think that “I disagree with you” or “I think you’re wrong” or even “I think you’re dangerously wrong” are synonyms for “I don’t have to acknowledge you.” I’m not sure that sentiment has had a great decade. I look at what happened in the city I love in February 2022 and I’m not sure what would fix it is one more writer who’s really angry. Please don’t read my book if you can’t handle such thoughts.

Subscriber reaction to my advice for young journalism colleagues was so positive I decided to keep the series going. My first task was to find people who know more than I do about important things. Of course one of my first calls went to Christina Frangou. I was so happy to get this formidable Calgary-based writer to write for Maclean’s; she promptly won a Gold and a Silver National Magazine Award for her feature writing. This week she won the 2022 Landsberg Award from the Canadian Journalism Foundation and the Canadian Women’s Foundation. Here’s her advice on succeeding as a freelancer, the best such counsel I’ve seen. Christina and all other occasional contributors to this newsletter will be properly paid, thanks to my subscribers. - pw

I’m flattered to be Paul’s inaugural guest writer here at To the Trade. Paul and I worked together eons ago at long-gone Southam News where I was an editorial assistant and he was the youngster columnist who could opine brilliantly on pretty much everything.

In 2001, I started freelancing to make extra money for grad school. I sort of eased into it as a part-time gig — the idea of full-time freelancing was terrifying. To be a freelancer means you’re running your own business and you’re doing so in an industry where businesses often fail. Twenty-plus years later, I’m still freelancing and for most of those years, I’ve been at it full-time. This past May, during a panel at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference, I was asked why I like being a freelancer. The answer is easy: autonomy. I have control over where and when I want to work, and what stories I choose to write.

It's hard to make a living as a freelance journalist, but there have never been so many ways you can make money as a freelance journalist. The opportunities exist; the challenge is finding the sweet spot where you are earning enough to continue while having a life outside of work. You’ve got to answer a few questions for yourself: What do you want to write about? Who do you want to write for? What kind of hours do you want to put in? And how much do you want to make?

I talk to a lot of freelancers and would-be freelancers about how to survive in this industry. These are my best tips for life as a freelance journalist.

1.You’ll have labours of love and labours of income. They’re both important.

It’s easy to get caught up in the kind of writing you enjoy the most. For me, that’s long-form feature writing. For others, it’s travel or food writing. But these aren’t always the most lucrative assignments.

The labours of income often subsidize the labours of love. That’s how I look at it. For side gigs, I do a lot of writing and editing for scientists and physicians, and some of it is super technical. It’s steady, interesting work that helps support me through the ups-and-downs of feature writing. Another advantage is that it’s not as emotionally laborious as feature writing. When I close a long feature, I’m usually pretty tapped out. So it’s nice to have something else to fall back on as I gear up for the next big feature. 

2. Figure out how much you need to make per month and doggedly pursue that goal.

I can’t remember who said this to me but the most important gift a writer can give themselves is financial stability. For me, that means making sure I earn enough every month to pay down my mortgage, cover my living expenses and put some aside.

It's challenging to think about monthly income when you’re focused on feature writing because long stories don’t happen on a monthly schedule. They’ll often span three to six months, with bursts of work and bits of downtime. Payment for these big assignments can be significant (relative to the rest of journalism), but very delayed: Some organizations pay 60 days after acceptance or on publication, and that’s after you’ve spent months working on something. I try to find smaller assignments to fit in at the same time as large features. Even better, these smaller assignments will pay on a speedier schedule. That ensures some money coming in every month while these pieces are in the works. My calculations don’t always work out perfectly, but I’m generally pretty close. In other words, don’t think just assignment by assignment, but look at your workload in terms of a monthly or quarterly income goal.

3. This is your job. Treat it as such.

Freelancer Jen A. Miller calls this the “no, I can’t pick you up at the airport” rule. Generally, people who don’t freelance will assume that you can and will bend to their schedule because your hours can be flexible. After all, you don’t really have a job. They are wrong. Set your hours and stick to them.

4. Find a niche.

A few years ago, while prepping for a workshop I was teaching on the business of writing, I asked editors why they choose to work with freelancers. The answer I heard most often was that they’re looking for expertise, especially for stories about complex subjects. They want writers they trust to deliver on time and who have a deep understanding of the subject. Freelancers benefit from having specialization on subjects like health or business or even true crime—subjects that are difficult to just dive into. These specialty areas are where the market for the written word (as well as podcasts and film) is growing. There are loads of trade publications focused on subjects within business and medicine, and these organizations generally pay better than general interest magazines and newspapers. Trade publications are wonderful places to learn your craft; the editors here know these subjects inside and out. Other potential clients in these specialties are business owners or health professionals who want a professional writer to help craft their message.

5. Think of every pitch and every story as a job interview.

You want editors to ask you to write for them again. So: File on time. Be organized. Be reliable. Be honest with your editor about challenges that arise in the reporting. If you think you’ll need an extension, ask for it as soon as possible.

Remember that you’re interviewing editors, too. You don’t want to write for someone who treats you poorly. For me, I want to write for editors who are supportive, who commission stories that excite me and challenge me, and who are clear about what they want in a story. I want to write for editors who will go to bat for me to be paid on time. I highlight that because payment delays are not uncommon in this industry and any editor who is nonchalant about delayed payments to writers is not someone I want to write for. I’m reluctant to write for editors and publications where scope creep is an issue. If someone commissions a story at $700 and asks for 1,000 words but then upgrades to 2,000 words in a second draft, they should pay a higher rate than outlined in the original contract. They should be willing to have discussions about higher pay. I just had an editor ask me to nearly double the length of a story on second draft, and she immediately increased my fee accordingly. I will write for her forever.

6. Build your network of writers.

This is advice borrowed from my friend, The Globe and Mail’s Jana Pruden. Jana isn’t a freelancer, but she’s one hell of a writer and the ultimate community builder so she’s earned honorary freelance status in my mind. Your writer community will help get you over all the bumps in the road. They’ll talk to you about your story ideas and help you figure out where to pitch. These are the people who will read your early drafts and tell you where to find the documents you need. They’ll know the answers to questions about the business side of freelancing. And they’ll put your name forward for assignments that they’re unavailable for. In trade, you must show up for them. Give them support, cheer on their successes and be their sounding board. I got some of my biggest stories because someone recommended me to an editor in need of a writer.

7. Set out to learn everything you can about journalism and freelancing.

There is no perfect in this industry. You need to keep getting better. I go to one journalism conference a year with a dear friend, also a freelancer. We’ve gone to the Canadian Association of Journalists conference and the Power of Narrative in Boston. We split hotel costs, which is the only way I can afford to do these conferences. We both come back recharged with new ideas and connections. I wish I’d been more diligent about conferencing and networking for the first ten years of freelancing.

You don’t need to spend the money on going to a conference either. There are exceptional resources available online for free: for instance, freelancer extraordinaire Katherine Laidlaw recommends the Longform podcast. And at a reasonable cost, Edmonton wunderkind Omar Mouallem offers courses at Pandemic University’s Pop-Up School of Writing with top-notch instructors who get into the nuts and bolts of writing. (I think I’ll be teaching there again this fall! Details to come.)

8. Read. Read. Read.

The more you read, the better you’ll write. Practice x-ray reading of stories and books. Keep a file of your favourite ledes and kickers. Take notes on structure. Read stories aloud. Follow writers you admire on social media; sometimes, they’ll give you a look under the hood of their stories, or they’ll give virtual talks that you can attend. Find old stories that are new to you. I’m a huge fan of used bookstores where I can sometimes find brilliant anthologies like The Stories We Tell. I’ve read this one so many times that the pages are falling out.

Read, read, read and then read some more. Here are few of my tried-and-true recommendations for freelance journalists:

• Storycraft: The Complete Guide to Writing Narrative Nonfiction by Jack Hart

• The Open Notebook (*The website is great but buy the book, too. Even though the book is intended for science journalists, it’s a goldmine for freelancing tips.)

• The Nieman Storyboard

• The Writers’ Union of Canada’s Tax Guide for Writers (it’s the best $9.99 a Canadian freelance writer can spend)  

• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo (and all of her magazine and newspaper stories!)

I’ve been adding new sections to this newsletter for different styles of writing: Positive Jam, for my writing on the arts and culture; En français, svp, for anything I might end up writing in French; and, as of today, To the Trade, which is where I’ll keep my writing about journalism as a craft, an industry, a slow-motion catastrophe, what have you.

I’ve already populated To The Trade with three short articles of advice to younger journalists. They’re tip sheets I wrote for participants in the Canadian Association of Journalists’ excellent mentorship program. Finding mentors used to be easier, when newsrooms were bigger. Since I didn’t study journalism formally, I got everything I know from colleagues, including older journalists who took the time to share tips. So when I’m able, I take the CAJ’s invitation to pay it forward to younger reporters.

The three short pieces I published today are discussions of technique rather than meditations on ethics, workplace politics or other worthy topics. On other days, I may indulge those loftier discussions. In the meantime, I’m not sure it’s always obvious to younger journalists how they’re supposed to execute the basics of the craft. So I sometimes think that’s where I can be most helpful, if at all.

Here are the three tip sheets:

Everything I know about interview technique

Everything I know about structuring a feature

Everything I know about developing your voice

Paywall’s down for this, so you can share it to the young journalist in your life…

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…though if you’re glad I wrote it, you are always free to make the leap and become a paid subscriber:

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Later this week I’ll be sending subscribers a substantial essay about the state of our politics, followed by morning-after thoughts on the Ontario election. And maybe some other stuff too. I’m grateful, as always, for your time and attention.

1. Style is secondary. Clarity comes first.

We’re journalists. We’re trying to explain factual matters to a broad audience. Doing that in a memorable way so they admire us is secondary. If we wanted to be treasured as wordsmiths we could have gone into poetry.

That doesn’t mean there’s no room to think about having a unique voice. It just means you never get to use your stylistic imperatives as an excuse for being inaccurate, for making important information hard to find, or for making readers sit through an extended display of your personal idiosyncrasies. You’ll lose work if you do that, and you should.

This is only fair. It also makes journalism like many other pursuits that are creative, but not only creative. There are a hundred ways to run an offensive play in basketball. They need to stay within the court’s boundaries, respect the time clock, and tend to increase the frequency of the ball’s trips to the net. Within those limits, do your thing. In music, same deal. The bassist Bob Hurst said, while he was working with Wynton Marsalis, “I would like to avoid the expectations of phrasing when I can do that without sounding contrived and without losing the swing.” That’s a good way of expressing the constant healthy tension between self-expression and satisfying one’s obligations.

2. Seek out superb models. Emulate them consciously. 

Again, my original model was jazz. Musicians learn, by ear, to recreate the great improvised solos of older musicians note for note, inflection for inflection. Chess players study the reasoning behind key moves in earlier players’ memorable games. When the Louvre first inched away from being a private royal art collection, the first ordinary citizens who were allowed in were artists, who were admitted with their easels and palettes so they could improve their craft by copying the paintings on display. 

When I decided I wanted to improve as a journalist, I began making all my leisure-time reading choices based on their nutritional value. I sought out writers who favoured strong, clear prose and, usually at first, short sentences. John Steinbeck, Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell. Later I diversified my diet considerably, but always with an eye to learning techniques of vivid expression. When I became the National Post’s parliamentary columnist, I read collections of columns from prominent parliamentary sketch writers in the UK. The form I’d been hired to write didn’t really exist in Canada, so I sought out British models. Soon enough I could discard their example and write the form in my own way, but the immersion method was a key step on the road to that destination. 

Why emulate instead of simply sitting and pondering the great stylistic questions on your own? A few reasons. First, you’re trying not to be self-indulgent. If you’re all Look, man, I’m working on my thing over here, it’s hard not to be a bit of a jerk. People will smell it in your prose.

Second, a lot of the mistakes you’re likely to make — verbosity, pacing errors, lack of clarity — are mistakes everyone is likely to make. Successful writers have simply worked all those errors out of their system. You save time if you study their error-free delivery. 

Third, I honestly believe some of these processes shouldn’t be entirely rational. Your style isn’t a mechanical construct. It rises out of your subconscious. It functions at the level of metaphor. It’s slightly weird. Leave it in the dark to grow, like a mushroom. Check the product now and then but don’t think too hard about the process.

One more thing.

I was talking to a mentorship session the other day when I read out loud, in quick succession, something I’d written the previous night, followed by something Cormac McCarthy published in 1994. Some of the similarities were striking. I don’t claim to be writing anywhere close to McCarthy’s level. The similarities were basic. Short sentences, words chosen for rhythmic effect, a kind of incantatory bluntness. I had no such effect in mind when I selected the two passages. No resemblance had occurred to me until I started reading aloud. But when I did, the effect of parallel construction freaked me out. 

What the hell was this? Here’s my guess: It was an effect of the fact that, as a young man, I added McCarthy to my pile of influences because there was something in his sound that matched the sound I imagined for my own writing. Out of thousands of possible influences, all potentially valid, I picked one who sounded like the voices in my head. 

I think the method I’m advocating is a kind of feedback loop.

I used to show up at journalism-school classes with a stack of suggested readings. These are the pieces that inspired me to want to be a better writer, I told students. Or more recent writing that gives me the same feeling of being in the presence of greatness. So you should check them out, I used to say.

I could even give you such a list now. Not definitive, never definitive, but exemplary. Like this. (Read Ulla Gutnikova even if you skip the rest):

Paul Wells’s inspirational writing for aspiring journalists who want to write like Paul Wells, if that’s even a thing

Joe Drape covering American Pharoah’s Triple Crown win for the New York Times.

Norman Maclean on fly fishing from A River Runs Through It. 

George Orwell’s A Hanging. The last paragraph is devastatingly understated.

William Faulkner’s Nobel banquet speech: “...the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing...” 

Wislawa Szymborska’s Nobel lecture: “But she kept on saying ‘I don’t know,’ and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm…”

Alla Gutnikova seven weeks ago, telling a Moscow court where to get off. 

Greg Tate’s obituary for Prince.

Langston Hughes’ Theme For English B.

Frank Scott’s Villanelle For Our Time, the great Canadian post-WWII poem. “Reshaping narrow law and art/ Whose symbols are the millions slain/ From bitter searching of the heart/ We rise to play a greater part.”

But eventually I stopped distributing lists like this. (Obviously not altogether.) I maintain the list I just gave you contains some magnificent writing. But if I may get a bit tautological, part of why it’s important to me is simply that… it’s important to me. Something else will be important to you.

Go find that something else.

Read widely, and keep a bookmark folder or a desk drawer or a corner of your bookcase for the writing that matters most to you. 

Then try to write like that writing, and never stop. 

I think this process — of selecting inspiring writers, trying to write like them, analyzing your shortcomings, and repeating endlessly — would bring you close to what the behavioural psychologist K. Anders Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” Ericsson is the guy Malcolm Gladwell was paraphrasing with his “10,000 hours rule,” which held that, say, the Beatles became a great band because they spent 10,000 hours playing gigs in Hamburg.

Hang on, Ericsson says, in a direct critique of Gladwell: it’s not that simple. Rote repetition in a kind of distracted grind won’t improve your game. To get better, he says, you need to practice with the intent to get better; work toward specific goals; and “find coaches and mentors.” Constant feedback from more skilled practitioners is a key part of Ericsson’s deliberate practice model.

I think when you find your own inspirational writers, and then make a conscious effort to write like them — their cadence, their structural choices, the emotions their writing evokes — you make those writers your coaches and mentors. You put a picture in your head of what your writing will sound like when it becomes great. And you get a chance to check your writing against that picture until you start to sound great.

See? I warned you I’d get a bit mystic about this stuff.

Good luck finding your voice.

In 1994 (I know! Long time ago) I wrote my first magazine article, for a defunct magazine called Saturday Night. I was starting to write about politics for the Montreal Gazette, so I wrote about Jacques Parizeau, the separatist Parti Québécois leader, who at that point was about to be elected Quebec’s premier.

I set aside a month to write the article. The magazine’s editor made me spend half that time refining my pitch — my argument about what the article would say. This seemed like a terrible waste of limited time. I finally realized he was teaching me how to write a long article.

In successive pitches, I kept adding new elements to my description of the article’s many wonders. He kept saying, “But what’s it going to say about him?”

In desperation, I bought a bunch of magazines and read a bunch of features. I’d been reading magazines for, at that point, nearly a decade, but I hadn’t really analyzed what I’d been reading from the viewpoint of structure. The main thing I noticed was that a long story has one big point to make about its subject, just as a short story does. The long story just has more detail, or more arguments, or more context. But still one point.

There are countless exceptions. I never did figure out what point Susan Orlean was making in “The American Man at Age 10,” except maybe the child is the father to the man. I think she was trying to say a lot of things, or nothing in particular. But she’s great and that story will last forever, so whatever. But way more often than not, there’s a single argument. It was negligence that caused the disaster. The candidate isn’t ready. The candidate is ready, despite appearances. The elaborate plan is doomed. Our heroes succeeded despite their doomed plan. The story of my poor aunt helped me understand life. Or the story of my poor aunt kept me from seeing what really matters.

On Parizeau, who was a doughy and cheerfully pompous economist who sounded British even when speaking French, my argument was that he was by far the sovereignty movement’s most formidable figure. Already a cheeky claim, because dashing Lucien Bouchard was already getting more ink. Later events would seem to prove me wrong, but I stand by my claim. Whether I was right matters less than that I had a claim, because having a central argument helps you make everything else coherent. 

Everything you’ve gathered for your feature – interviews, archival research, structural thinking, observed colour – must be compared against the point you’re trying to make, and discarded if found unhelpful.

You don’t need to know what your point will be when you start working. In fact it’s usually best to let your work strongly influence your choice of a point. (Or a thesis if you want a fancier word.) You should definitely decide what your point is before you start to write, because writing is a process of deciding how to illustrate and defend your central claim. And you’ll probably still be reporting when you realize what argument or claim you’re going to be making. But don’t worry if you’ve done a lot of reporting and you still don’t know what your article will be about. You’re exploring.

2. Picking a structure is the second-last thing you’ll do. The last thing is to write the feature.

What comes before you choose your structure? All of your reporting. Or as much of your reporting as possible before deadlines loom. That means your reporting should come first — before you’ve spent much time deciding how you’re going to tell your story. Structure is a way of deploying the information you’ve gathered. So your choices about structure will largely depend on what you’ve gathered. Picking a structure, an argument, a claim before you’ve done your reporting amounts to dismissing, from the outset, the possibility that your research might surprise you. Which is a good way of ensuring nothing you write will surprise your reader.

Research can take many forms. Interviews with the subject, their friends, their antagonists. An institutional paper trail, like court rulings or relevant statistics. Reading for historical context — When has this sort of thing happened before? — and comparative context — Where else does it happen? (I can just about guarantee that whatever you’re writing about has happened before or somewhere else. Finding that context will set you apart from all your colleagues who will claim everything is brand new, simply because it’s new to them.) Even analogies to literature or to academic research can be pertinent. 

Once you’ve got your research, gather it in one place, re-read it, and take notes on the themes that emerge. He had a rough childhood or Officials in his position often crack or His favourite teacher once predicted this would happen. Consider different ways to deploy these elements, different orders, different emphases — always in support of your central claim, or thesis. 

The order in which you deploy your story elements will decide your story’s structure. Probably most of your elements will take place in the story’s “now” but there are some parts that take place in the story’s prehistory — the subject’s childhood, say, or the 1840s. You can decide where those background bits best fit, in relation to the more contemporary stuff. Maybe you’ll need a flashback, so most of the story takes place “now” but at some point you segue: “It wasn’t always like this….” Where should that happen? Now’s the time to ponder these questions.

Making these structural decisions before you write helps ensure that an editor won’t need to perform major surgery on your story to fix wonky pacing. Making these decisions after you report ensures that your decisions are informed by a rich understanding of what you’re trying to say. 

3. Any structure is allowed. But any structure has to serve your highest goal: clarity.

Journalism isn’t fair. Your reader owes you nothing. At the first sign of trouble, they’ll turn the page, close the tab, move on to the next distraction. The obligation runs all one way: you have to make your writing as easy to read as possible.

That doesn’t mean you need to make it simplistic. I’m proud that I cover complex topics – budget math, theoretical physics, federalism – but I learned early that when I’m writing about something tough, I need to take the time to walk readers through the material. They’ll stick with you through that. But if you suddenly vault them into a flashback without explaining clearly that you’ve changed time frames between paragraphs, they’ll leave. 

So don’t indulge complex structures for kicks. And if you do depart from, say, strict chronology, signpost the hell out of it. “It wasn’t always so easy. When Jones was 23 she was a graduate student at the University of X. She was immersed in the study of X Y Z.” You should hear the gears shift as you read. I often number different sections of an argument or chronology. “First, blah blah blah. Second, bleep blorp. Third…” Nobody’s ever complained that my writing is mechanical or whatever. At least not because I number things. 

4. Be comfortable making big cuts and leaving big parts out.

Structure is about choice. Dumping your notebook into a Word file isn’t a choice, or at least not a good one. A great writer at The Gazette in Montreal once told me you should use about 25% of what you gather for a long story. That’s not a rule, but you should be prepared for the feeling of putting real work into some aspect of a story, then leaving it out because it doesn’t pull its weight.

My second Harper book was going to be, in large part, a book about Harper as a wartime prime minister. Afghanistan turned bad as soon as he showed up. (Basically coincidence.) There was a whole ethical arc. I ended up writing almost none of that. I just had some other stuff to say, and the book couldn’t be 800 pages.  Incidentally nobody’s ever told me, “Great book, except it was skimpy on Afghanistan.” If your story is about something, most readers won’t notice what it’s not about.

For the latest round, instead of general advice, I offered tips on three specific elements of the craft: Interview skills, structuring a long feature article, and developing a distinctive voice as a writer. I promised my mentees — an awkward term; maybe younger colleagues? — some tip sheets, and I decided to publish them here in case other colleagues find them interesting.

Note that these are, essentially, discussions of technique. I figure there are a million other places to debate doctrine, ethics, workplace challenges, or correct attitude toward the latest headlines. A lot of those discussions are really interesting! But I’m not sure people who wonder how to do this are well-served. So that’s how I’m trying to help.

With that preface in mind, here are my tips on interviewing.

1. It’s just an interview.

Don’t worry too much about how good you are at interviewing. The biggest variable in your ability to get a good interview is the subject. If they’re willing to talk, and they’re a great talker, it’ll be hard for you to screw the interview up. If they’re neither, you can only get so far. You can improve your results a lot with good technique, but in the end if they don’t want to talk you can’t make them. I find this knowledge liberating.

2. It doesn’t have to sound like a conversation.

A great conversation is an interaction between two good talkers. In an interview, half of this dynamic is, to some extent, optional. Any effort you put into sounding impressive is wasted. If you fluff a question, just start over. If you realize 20 minutes later that your subject made an interesting point, come back to it. You don’t have to be artful about it: “Can we get back to what you were saying about that thing in 2011? I just thought of something I want to know about that.” 

Above all, don’t hesitate to ask the dumb questions. “Why did you do that?” “How do you do that?” “Was this before or after the other thing?” “Wait, I’m not sure, how could it come before? Explain it to me.” Your goal isn’t to impress the subject, it’s to get them to say the words. And since sometimes the obvious answer isn’t the actual answer, they should get a chance to give a real answer to the obvious question. 

A transcript of your questions will probably read like a mess. That’s fine. You won’t publish a transcript of your questions. Your goal is to get the subject talking. Whatever you have to say to get that to happen, don’t worry about it. Your words and delivery are for making the subject talk, not for being independently impressive.

3. Decide beforehand what the interview’s about.

One of the saddest stories I know is about the late-night host Conan O’Brien, who was so eager to interview the Johnson biographer Robert Caro that he launched a podcast, just in case Caro said yes. He was famous for telling jokes on TV but all he really wanted to do was ask Robert Caro about writing. He pestered Caro’s publicists for years. The New York Times wrote a story about his Caro-quest. Finally Caro gave him an interview. Listen to it. It’s terrible. O’Brien spends the first 20 minutes or more explaining Caro’s books to him. I’m pretty sure Caro knows what’s in his books. Conan’s questions, when he finally starts asking some, are variations on “— Isn’t it cool that you did this thing I noticed, which I will now explain?” In all his eagerness, Conan never asked himself a basic question: “What’s Robert Caro’s role in my Robert Caro interview?” 

Say you’re interviewing a famous scientist who just won a prize. You could ask how they got into science. You could ask when they felt most alone. You could ask how government policy could have better supported research like theirs. You could ask what the big unanswered questions are that they still want to tackle. You could ask how they came up with the design of their breakthrough experiment. Until you pick a theme or a couple of themes, it’s not obvious which is the best question, or sequence of questions. It becomes obvious when you decide what key themes you hope to get them talking about. 

Say you eventually decide, in your interview prep, that you mostly want to know about their biggest experimental insight, the breakthrough moment. Okay then. Where were they when the moment happened? How had the day been going? What about the two months leading up to that day? Were they feeling frustrated? Did they do something specific to break the logjam? Did they take a break, or confide in friends, or buy better equipment, or have a snack? Were they on high alert, or kind of distracted, expecting another lousy day? When did they realize this wasn’t that? Who else was there in the room? Who said what first? And so on. Your preferred focus makes many of your choices about specific questions much easier.

4. Prepare a list of questions. Be ready to ignore it.

The first part is optional, the second mandatory. You have a list of questions for the same reason military generals have a battle plan: to be prepared and confident. You also have the same expectation they do: something will happen, probably early, to make the plan obsolete. From there, your next question is based on the subject’s answer to the last question. If you need to, you can get back to your list later. Once you start basing your questions on their answers, you probably won’t need to.

5. Short questions are better.

“Prime Minister, you’ve said you favour a policy of blah-dee-blah, but last week Mr. Jones said that couldn’t be so. He says there’s a limit to the amount of blorp diddy blorp. Understanding that the premiers are divided on this, and time is running out, do you think you can keep doing X or do you still have time to derpity derp a doo? Can you also answer in French, please, and have you made a bet with the president about the big game?”

At some point, a question becomes so long it’s impossible to answer in good faith. Long questions offer all kinds of hiding spots. If a question’s in three parts, the interviewee will just answer the easiest part. Or they’ll “pivot to message,” which means they ignore your word salad and just say the thing their PR team wants them to say. “Well, heh-heh, I don’t know about all that, but one thing I do know is…” Long questions are always easy to answer. And the answers they produce are usually boring. 

When I was young, before I was really sure I even intended to become a journalist, NBC had a guy named John Chancellor who’d been their main news anchor many years earlier. They would still bring him out for big interviews with newsmakers. He’d ask questions like, “You’ve said now is not the time to engage with China. Why not?” It’s basically impossible to find a place to hide in a question like that. You have to answer it, or make it plain to everyone that you’re not answering it.

Even in much less confrontational settings, short questions can be powerful. “I never had a great relationship with my parents.” “Why not?” There’s no way to know where that story will go. So don’t try to guess. Let your subject tell their tale.

6. Help your subject say their thing.

It’s fair to contradict your subject, fact-check them, press them. In some circumstances it can even be brilliant. (This interview with singer Eddie Vedder helps illustrate why David Marchese is considered a model interviewer. He’s constantly prodding Vedder, not letting him off the hook. But the vibe isn’t “You’re in trouble,” it’s “I love you, but this is my job and I’m not going to let you take this hour off work.”) If all you give a subject is contradiction and pressure, the message they’ll get is definitely “You’re in trouble,” and they’ll react defensively. Congratulations, you’ve defeated your purpose when that happens. Most of the time, you should be encouraging.

I had a colleague who would routinely say, “That’s so interesting,” with great conviction, whenever a subject said something interesting. It’s like sunshine on a flower. If you can find ways to make your next question entirely about the last thing they said, it’s even better. “That can’t have been easy,” when they’ve begun to describe how hard something was. “He said that, after everything you’d been through?” “So what you’re telling me is that this whole thing began two years before the big blow-up?” 

Obviously sometimes you’re going to do an essentially confrontational interview. But even then, you mostly don’t want it to feel like a siege. You want the antagonist in your story to have every fair opportunity to explain what they were doing. And if you can manage not to be grudging about that, if you can let them feel that they are being heard, you might uncover aspects of their action and their attitude that, while they might not change your mind about what they did, will at least add depth to the reader’s understanding of what happened.

Giving a subject about whom you plan to be critical a fair chance to tell their side of things takes humility. And humility takes courage. Courage improves with practice. 

7. Prepare, but wear it lightly.

The more you know about your interviewee and the topic, the better everything will go. You’ll know the main events in their life and how things got to this point. You’ll spot contradictions, evasions, evolutions in attitude that others might miss. You’ll be confident. So it’ll actually be easier to respond to surprises by improvising. 

Always remember, though, that you and your interview subject aren’t two experts who are trying to impress the world’s only other expert. You’re trying to inform an audience of people who aren’t experts. So don’t “jargon up” to your interviewee. Make sure the transcript at the end has lots of language anyone could understand.

8. The way the interview comes out isn’t quite the way you have to write it.

There’s a lot of debate about how much you can edit an interview. David Marchese (whose explanation of his method in this interview is really valuable) makes it clear that if the most interesting moment happens two-thirds of the way through the interview, he’s not shy about moving that up to the top of the written product.

Beyond that, you shouldn’t hesitate to cut everything that’s boring, confusing or useless. Even the first or last parts of sentences, as long as what you preserve is a coherent clause. Do you clean up grammar? I never hesitate to take out false starts. “What I, what I think is that, I think it all began in Sarnia…” becomes “It all began in Sarnia….”

But you have to preserve meaning. The subject has to read the interview and think, “That’s what I said, all right.” That means preserving sentence structure. On that, though, one more note: Nobody owns punctuation. Punctuation isn’t objective. Break up long strings of words into coherent sentences. Often quite short. Instead of: “Nobody owns punctuation, punctuation isn’t objective, break up long strings of words into coherent sentences, often quite short.”

Helpful links:

Taffy Brodesser-Akner explains her technique. 

Samantha Bee interviews Marc Maron (she misses some big chances to respond to his answers, so with great respect to Sam Bee, to me this is an example of how not to do it.)

Marc Maron interviews Kenneth Branagh (pairs with the Sam Bee interview to, I would argue, Maron’s great advantage) 

Frank Rich interviews Chris Rock. A spectacularly successful interview. Note how little of what Rich says is memorable. He’s there to help Chris Rock.